La voluntad de creer

Pablo Messiez (Las canciones) investigates faith as a driving force for action, inspired by Ordet film C.T. Dreyer.

Max 2023 Award to the Best theater show.

The will to believe begins with the return home of Amparo, the youngest of four brothers. He returns from South America with Claudia, his wife, who is Argentine and is pregnant, because they want the girl to be born in Europe. In her house, things continue more or less as bad as when they left: the older sister, Happiness, prostrate in a wheelchair, lives bitter in a world she does not understand; Paz, the other sister, who calls herself "single, poet and drunk"doesn’t seem to be going through a good time either. Finally, John, the little brother, continues to hold that it is Jesus of Nazareth who has returned to earth. With this family context per frame, Claudia’s pregnancy begins to complicate until it triggers tragedy, despite the attempts of the village doctor to avoid it. However, John, in his folly, will succeed in taking the leap of faith that will make life possible.


Only those who have the will to believe act. That is the premise of the work by the Argentine director Pablo Messiez in a production whose title is taken from an extract from the trial of Joan of Arc. According to Robert Bresson's film about her, when she was asked how she knew the voice she heard was from an angel, she replied "because I wanted to believe." For Messiez, this is a good definition of action. The play, which is also influenced by the resurrection scene in C.T. Dreyer's film Ordet, looks at this paradigm with the same team as in Las canciones. This is another production set strictly in the present, which also takes the role of the audience in the entire dramatic event into account. Why, what makes us all - performers and the audience - believe things that are a priori irrational?

The play was created in 2021 in five sessions of Ensayo abierto, as part of the 21 distritos season in Madrid, and premiered on September 7 at the Max Aub Hall on the Naves del Español in Matadero Madrid.


WHAT THE PRESS SAID

Best spanish show at the #TopVolodia2022

"From Pablo Messiez’s new show comes the feeling of having been in an unusual place. A rare space-time in which the past and the present converge, reality and fiction, prose and poetry, life and death. A gaseous territory like clouds. And it contains (almost at the end of the show) a silence so full of content, strength and tension that puts your heart into a hundred. Great theater."
Raquel Vidales – Babelia (El País)

"This theatrical adaptation of Ordet has the appearance of an experiment, almost of working progress for its open end. But let’s not kid ourselves, we are before a very rehearsed work, with trained actors and a renowned set designer like Max Glaenzel, architect of a fabulous black and white space that is built as the work progresses and in which the inspiration of the film is evident (...) Good for Messiez, for his ingenious and beautiful way of channelling the theme to a new territory, even if it is a trick of the original."
Liz Perales – El Cultural (Elespañol.es)

"The theatre of Pablo Messiez has an unmistakable patina, a unique accent and a very particular way -also effective- of communicating with the public. It is not a comfortable theatre, it is a demanding theatre, with its own universe, sometimes hermetic, and a poetics that asks the viewer to abandon himself to the beauty of words, his true backbone. La voluntad de creer is pure Messiez."
Julio Bravo – ABC

"Messiez exhibits his maturity as a stage director in La voluntad de creer, he builds characters who are as lost as we are, he invokes that ritual and sacred nature of theater that also share La Zaranda or Angelica Liddell and he turns it into a space in which to meet and believe together in something that, outside of there, is not possible. He achieves this with a refined staging, with actors who follow him and give themselves and move between tragedy and humor, between the transcendent and the mundane, between reason and miracle."
Marta García Miranda – Elconfidencial.es

"Pablo Messiez is consolidated as one of the most important playwrights of the Spanish scene with La voluntad de creer. (...) He delves into the different figures that appear with a very enriched language, each word and the way in which they connect with each other make it a unique experience. Thus, it is not only brilliant in what is counted, but in how it does it, a master play that exposes the need to take care of content and form."
Diego Dacosta – cinemagavia.es

"The twist of this new work is admirable. With a sharp staging, a theatre based on ritual and acting, a memorable scenery and a light from another time, Messiez is able to revisit one of the most dazzling works of art of the twentieth century and turn it into a song to theatre, to love and to the other. Another question is whether, as the Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer did in Ordet (1955), he manages to perform a miracle on stage. For that, you’ll have to go see her and decide."
ElDiario.es - Pablo Caruana Húder